Labeling Rails Enums

Rails 4.1 introduced ActiveRecord Enums, a handy little feature that lets you store an integer in a database column, but use symbols or strings in your code.  Until today, I've been presenting these in select boxes with code like this:

This generates a perfectly acceptable select box if you don't need internationalization and the enum names you've picked are good enough to present to the user.  If thats not the case, or you to change the presentation without changing the code, a new helper method leveraging Ruby's internationalization (i18n) features can be a good approach.

Keep reading for how I changed the presentation of enumerations in a drop down without changing my models or renaming the enumeration names.

Removing milliseconds in JSON under ActiveRecord 4.0

Rails 4.0 introduced a small bug in JSON generation with this pull request. The output format for times (ActiveRecord::TimeWithZone) in JSON changed to include milliseconds. Sounds good right? Well, not if your API clients crash trying to parse milliseconds. Unfortunately, Rails 4.0 didn't provide a configuration option for the timestamp precision in JSON output. What is a programmer under the gun to do? Upgrade to Rails 4.1 or get out your monkey and your patch and get to work?

Model is a poor scope name in Ruby on Rails 4

Upgrading from Rails 3.2 to Rails 4.0 is not a trivial task. Sure, there is a guide, but when you upgrade you'll probably be upgrading a lot of your gems, maybe your jQuery and jQuery-UI versions and then there are all the undocumented unintentional changes that can cause you grief. If you've got a good test suite (you have one right?) you'll catch a lot of these, but some will leave you scratching your head. This one tripped me up for a while: we had a very simple scope stop working in Rails 4.

The scope model below works in Rails 3.2, but fails in Rails 4 when used with an association: